Made in Moldova: human organs / Miserable economy forces many to sell body parts to survive

Peter Baker, Washington Post

Published
4:00 am PST, Friday, November 8, 2002

2002-11-08 04:00:00 PDT Minjir, Moldova -- Nicolae Birdan still chokes up at the memory of his father growing ill. Unable to find work as a welder, Birdan labored on a farm for a month, and almost all the money he made went to buy medicine for his father. He could barely feed his wife and infant son.

As he contemplated his dilemma, the 24-year-old could think of no way to raise money -- he had nothing to sell. Or did he? Finally, he heard something from a friend who put him in touch with a woman, and before long he found himself spirited out of the country and lying on an operating table in Turkey.

A week later he was on a bus back to Moldova with $2,700 in his pocket -- and one less kidney.

"I realized I wasn't going to come back the same," he says now, "but I had no choice. I needed money to treat my father."

Here in one of the poorest villages in the poorest country in Europe, at least 14 and possibly as many as 40 men and women made the same traumatic decision to sell body parts to survive.

This is a desperate place where desperate choices seem reasonable and mafia- like rings prey on the unsuspecting. Young girls and women are sold into sex slavery abroad. Young men were shipped off to fight in the Balkans over the past decade. About 25 percent of the working-age population has left the country to try to find work.

Perhaps no place in Europe faces the wrenching problems of poverty quite as acutely as Moldova. Torn by civil war and lagging behind while the rest of Europe charges forward toward economic union, this landlocked former Soviet republic sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania has become a black-market hub of human trafficking.

Most prostitutes working in the Balkans came from Moldova, and European investigators consider this Maryland-sized farming country of 4.4 million a key source of kidneys sold to wealthy Israelis and Europeans.

For a time last year, Moldova even cut off foreign adoptions for fear that babies were being sold for spare parts, a concern that proved unfounded but seemed credible enough to investigate.

"Poverty and personal problems force people to do this," said Adrian Tanase,

head of the renal transplant department at the gloomy, run-down hospital in the capital of Chisinau.

Every month someone walks into his office begging to sell an organ, which the doctor turns down. "In developed countries, that hasn't been done for a long time, but here you can buy or sell anything."

Moldova has struggled to transform itself into a modern state since gaining independence in 1991. In linguistic, ethnic and cultural terms, Moldovans are close if not identical to Romanians, and after the Soviet breakup many agitated to rejoin Romania -- which it had been part of between the world wars.

That precipitated the tiny nation's own rupture, when a pro-Moscow eastern region, Trans-Dniester, waged war in 1992 to break off, taking with it the country's sole steel factory and a huge store of ammunition.

While pan-Romanianism has faded, Moldova has never fully recovered. More than 80 percent of its people live below the poverty line. For years, the government paid wages and pensions only sporadically, and until recently electricity was available just a few hours a day.

All of which made Moldova an easy target for exploitation. The International Organization for Migration considers Moldova the main European source of women and children for forced prostitution in Western Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East. A team from the Council of Europe, a human rights organization, visited last month to investigate Moldova's role in the human organ trade.

"The situation is very dire," said Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the migration organization, which set up a Chisinau center last year to fight sex slavery. "It's a lucrative activity, it's a low-risk activity. The women who are trafficked have no one to turn to."

Buying human organs is illegal throughout most of the world, but underground rings flourish because so many people need kidney transplants and donated organs from cadavers are so scarce. The ring that operated in Minjir served patients from Israel or Europe who paid up to $150,000 for a kidney, according to investigators. Finding voluntary donors in Israel is difficult because many Jews believe bodies must be buried whole.

Moldovan officials have moved to combat the problems. The government opened a human-trafficking department to investigate cases, and the migration office launched a campaign to warn Moldovan women to beware of overtures from abroad.

The main weapon against such exploitation would be economic improvement, and some signs point to a turnaround. For the first time since independence, the economy grew 4 percent last year and is on track to grow another 6 percent this year.